Lately I have been learning of more and more programmers who think that if they were working alone, they would be faster and would deliver more quality. Usually that feeling is attached to a feeling that they do the best programming in their team and at the end of the day the idea is quite plausible. If they ARE doing the best programming, and worked alone (and more maybe) the final result would be a better piece of software.

I know this idea would only work if you were passionate enough to work 24/7, on a deadline, with great discipline.

So after considering the idea and trying to learn a little more, I wonder if there are famous one-man-army programmers that have delivered any (useful) software in the past?

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Net productivity drops when hours go to high. Don't assume the best of the best are there merely because they invest more time. If that were the case, anyone could become a great programmer.
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BrianFeb 9 '09 at 20:31

5

Most of the answers are wrong. Anders didn't build C# or Turbo Pascal all by himself, for example.
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Robert S.Feb 10 '09 at 2:01

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Its weird that the number of votes to close is constant, while this question have 22 up votes and 14 favs, it only needs 4 votes to have it closed huh?
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DFectuosoFeb 10 '09 at 17:21

The requirement is to build from scratch an SQL engine working on in memory data (take > this as a given. Try to estimate the no. of lines of code (programming
language/environment of your choice) this is going to take, and the time it will take
you to build it.

Try to estimate the same considering someone you consider good, and someone you
consider average.

Scroll down when you've written down your estimates.

Did you ?

Well ?

Using the programming language K, [ http://nsl.com/k/t.k ], a 14 line implementation,
took Stevan Apter a couple of hours to write; But that's just the backend. You want an
SQL interface? Arthur Whitney just published one in [ http://kx.com/q/e/s.k ], taking
all of 20 lines (admittedly, denser than Stevan's); 3 for lexing, ~8 for parsing, the
rest for evaluating. I don't know how long it took Arthur, but a day would probably be
way too long.

The Build Engine History

The Build engine was written by Ken Silverman in 1994 and has gone through several major enhancements from its initial version. Ken wrote a game named "Ken's Labyrinth" in 1992 which he sent demos of to several games companies. One of those companies was Apogee Software. Apogee wasn't interested in the game but they were interested in the engine. He later started writing a demo named "Build" in 1993 which he also sent out to several companies. Apogee offered him a contract to write the Build engine for them.

Ken has a page on his website which features a timeline outlining the development and events surrounding the Build engine. Ken also has available for download old demos of the engine at various points in it's development and now the full source code!

Personal note - I consider it a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see Cutler's code in NT (most of it still lives on today in Windows). It is by far the most gorgeous code I've seen, in any language. I used to look it up when I felt I needed 'code inspiration'. Getting to meet him and work with him in Windows Azure will definitely count as one of the highlights of my Microsoft career.

I once asked Ivan Sutherland "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year?" He said "Well, I didn't know it was hard".

DJ Delorie for DJGPP? Although I'm not sure if that was a one man job. As Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen pointed out in the comments to this answer, although the port is very impressive, it is a port of GCC, which is a major example of multi-person group effort.

Jeff Minter. He's been programming video games and music light synthesizers since the early 1980's. While he does work with another programmer now, he was a one-man-show for many years. His most impressive feat IMHO? Writing Tempest 3000 for the defunct Nuon, in assembler.

Peter Blum, creator of a nice collection of very useful custom ASP.NET controls. On top of everything else he does, his documentation is some of the most detailed I've ever seen even outdoing Microsoft's in granularity. And yet he still does it all himself.